The girls said she was too cynical about love, but how could you not be? On the surface, relations between men and women were all soft kisses and white gowns and hand-holding. But underneath they were a scary, complicated, ugly mess, just waiting to rise to the surface.

Women leave their marriages when they can't take any more. Men leave when they find someone new.

I love the smell of a mans skin.

I like dressing up for dates and dissecting a dinner conversation with a new guy to determine if he might be The One.

She had once said that she believed the women's liberation movement of the sixties and seventies was actually a ploy by men to get women to do more.

She thought about him all the time - not so much about Doug the individual, but rather about the nature of love, and the shock of learning how quickly it could disappear.

Every woman needs secrets,' her mother said with a smile then, her eyes meeting Sally's in the rearview mirror. 'Remember that when you're old like me, pumpkin, because the world has a way of making a woman's life everyone else's business--you have to dig out a little place that's only yours.